Turning Social Media into “Intelligence”: Topsy

In our Should you jump on the Google+ Bus article last week we mentioned that Topsy is a real-time search browser for the social web. Back in October, TechCrunch reported that Topsy had launched a beta platform for following & indexing Google+ posts. (It had already acquired all of Twitter’s tweet feeds.)

Although Topsy is open to the public, it is actually designed for social media & marketing analysts. While traditional search engines rely upon crawling and indexing that utilize page citation and ranking methods, Topsy’ approach processes links being shared between people, ordering results based on its influence ranking algorithm.

Topsy’s APIs help identify social signals, so that analysts can extract & quantify conversations, determine what’s important & form prediction models. They identify influencers & thereby give you opportunities to influence the influencers.

Topsy’s labeling criteria are vigorous. For example, of the 250 million tweets indexed each day, only the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users are tagged “Highly Influential”, and “Influential” tags appear only for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users.

SearchEngineLand’s Greg Finn reported that a search of ‘iPhone 5’ in Topsy’s Google+ Beta produced “much cleaner and more concise” results than the same search in actual Google+.

Topsy must be doing something right. Topsy told CNBC that its social sentiment scores are being used to predict stock prices with statistical significance.

And, they just hired Cisco Systems CEO Duncan Greatwood, to scale the company up.